WHEN liberties are naked, a person may be free to do as he wishes, but
others are similarly free to interfere with his actions. As Hillel Steiner
has observed: "Like other naked things, unvested liberties are exposed to the
numbing effects of cold fronts: in the case of liberties, to the obstructive
impact of others' exercise of their powers and liberties."1 Liberty (capital "L")
requires the protection of liberties (small "l"),2 but given that the world is one
of subjective scarcity, not all liberties or freedom can be protected, however
nice that would be. Rights are concepts that define a domain within which
persons ought to be at liberty or free to do as they please free of interference
by others.3 In this sense "No one ever has a right to do something; he only has
a right that some one else shall do (or refrain from doing) something. In other
words, every right in the strict sense relates to the conduct of another."4

The liberal conception of justice is the respect of rights.5 Some rights are natural in so far as the domains they define are prerequisites for the pursuit of

See Steiner, Essay on Rights, p. 87. Adopting H. L. A. Hart's refinement of the
Benthamite distinction between naked and vested liberties, Steiner defines a "vested liberty [as] one surrounded by a 'protective perimeter' formed by others' duties which,
though not specifically correlative to any right in the liberty-holder to exercise that liberty, nonetheless effectively prohibit their interference." Ibid. 75.

Because of the confusion that may arise from distinguishing Liberty from liberties,
classical liberals sometimes distinguish between Liberty (meaning those liberties that are
protected) and Freedom (meaning all liberties whether protected or not). See e.g., ibid. 60 n. 4: "Liberty in this normative or evaluative or rule-constituted sense, is to be distinguished from the descriptive or empirical concept--absence of prevention--which . . . I
shall henceforth refer to as 'freedom' where confusion between the two might otherwise
occur." I shall do the same.

See ibid. 76: "A vested liberty is internal to a person's rights--contained by them
because protected by their correlative duties--while a naked liberty is interstitial to
respective persons' rights, suspended in whatever action-space is left between them.
Vested liberties exist in one-man's land; naked liberties inhabit no-man's land."

See Steiner, Essay on Rights, p. 109: "[M]oral reasoning is reasoning about moral
actions. And moral actions are ones directed towards our various ends which we believe
should be pursued and sustained by everyone and ought not to be obstructed or abolished
by anyone. One such end may be justice: the requirement that moral rights be respected."

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